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Companies will pawn off thier customers to AI at their peril. In many ways this is a repeat of the India call center train wrecks of the 00s. On paper, letting

by cmiles8 2mo ago

Companies will pawn off thier customers to AI at their peril. In many ways this is a repeat of the India call center train wrecks of the 00s. On paper, letting someone in Bangalore vs onshore handle incoming customer service calls looked like a path to amazing savings. In practice the customer experience was horrendous and companies CTRL-Zed these decisions and rapidly brought customer service back onshore again. AI is just that story of shortsighted decisions by weak leadership playing out all over again.

graemep 2mo ago
Its still a huge and growing business and one that AI helps https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/call-centres-using-ai-whiten-090000847.html https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/call-centres-using-ai-whi...
- moomoo11 2mo ago
  lol at the title
  - phatfish 2mo ago
    probably works about as well as all the whitening products western cosmetic companies dump over there
    - graemep 2mo ago
      I did not think the companies making them are western. India has plenty of its own, and has been making skin lightening cosmetics for literally millennia.
munk-a 2mo ago
This, I suspect, is exactly like offshoring - and a lot of companies died during the offshoring fad because their software products become full of low quality merges and feature improvements that the company couldn't afford to fix or remove by the time they realized there was a problem. That remains my primary concern with AI code generation - well established codebases might become full of slop to the point of being unusable without a clear path back to maintainability leading to company death.
- Marsymars 2mo ago
  There's precedence for new versions of software being abandoned for older code bases... usually the new version doesn't ship or gets forked relatively quickly though, e.g. the Windows Longhorn reset or the Gnome 3/MATE fork.
  - munk-a 2mo ago
    It can happen - and companies can recover from that. But that's wasting a whole lot of money and a lot of executives will sunk cost fallacy themselves into continuing when that may be the much saner decision. I didn't mean to imply that all companies that went hard into AI will die - just that a lot of companies that follow the trend may not realize the true maintenance costs and of those that did misguidedly follow the trend I'm sure some will luck or manage their way out of disaster for various reasons.
snarf21 2mo ago
The bigger question is that given all the consolidation and monopolies, if the top 2/3 companies do this, what is the alternative? Even for something like car insurance in the US, all the ELT at those want EBITDA at all costs. I'm not sure what fall out will be.
chrisjj 2mo ago
> companies CTRL-Zed these decisions and rapidly brought customer service back onshore again. Not here in UK. They rerouted to the Phillipines, Egypt etc.
le-mark 2mo ago
> In practice the customer experience was horrendous and companies CTRL-Zed these decisions and rapidly brought customer service back onshore again. No they didn’t, I can’t remember the last time I talked to an on shore rep.

by cmiles8 2mo ago

graemep 2mo ago

Its still a huge and growing business and one that AI helps https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/call-centres-using-ai-whiten-090000847.html https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/articles/call-centres-using-ai-whi...

moomoo11 2mo ago
lol at the title
- phatfish 2mo ago
  probably works about as well as all the whitening products western cosmetic companies dump over there
  - graemep 2mo ago
    I did not think the companies making them are western. India has plenty of its own, and has been making skin lightening cosmetics for literally millennia.

munk-a 2mo ago

This, I suspect, is exactly like offshoring - and a lot of companies died during the offshoring fad because their software products become full of low quality merges and feature improvements that the company couldn't afford to fix or remove by the time they realized there was a problem. That remains my primary concern with AI code generation - well established codebases might become full of slop to the point of being unusable without a clear path back to maintainability leading to company death.

Marsymars 2mo ago
There's precedence for new versions of software being abandoned for older code bases... usually the new version doesn't ship or gets forked relatively quickly though, e.g. the Windows Longhorn reset or the Gnome 3/MATE fork.
- munk-a 2mo ago
  It can happen - and companies can recover from that. But that's wasting a whole lot of money and a lot of executives will sunk cost fallacy themselves into continuing when that may be the much saner decision. I didn't mean to imply that all companies that went hard into AI will die - just that a lot of companies that follow the trend may not realize the true maintenance costs and of those that did misguidedly follow the trend I'm sure some will luck or manage their way out of disaster for various reasons.

snarf21 2mo ago

The bigger question is that given all the consolidation and monopolies, if the top 2/3 companies do this, what is the alternative? Even for something like car insurance in the US, all the ELT at those want EBITDA at all costs. I'm not sure what fall out will be.

chrisjj 2mo ago

> companies CTRL-Zed these decisions and rapidly brought customer service back onshore again. Not here in UK. They rerouted to the Phillipines, Egypt etc.

le-mark 2mo ago

> In practice the customer experience was horrendous and companies CTRL-Zed these decisions and rapidly brought customer service back onshore again. No they didn’t, I can’t remember the last time I talked to an on shore rep.